51–60 of 69 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
~200 staff? Sounds like an awful lot. And I imagine the front end and backed are kinda done now so after a couple of devs maintaining the system, a sys admin or two, some testers, hr and ceo that leaves ~190 scanning in the documents. Or am I oversimplifying this?
Not really. Compare their operating budget with Project Gutenberg.
I recognise that it may seem that I'm being overly pedantic but to me it seems that they are treating information like stuff when information does not act like stuff at all. I'm not one of these techno-utopian "information wants to be free" people, but at the same time we can't treat information the same way we treat stuff.
JSTOR should get that the rules have changed, if Wikipedia can build a competitor to Britannica then JSTOR can figure out how to provide (relatively) inexpensive access to the information that they are hoarding. Given that this is the very information that is meant to help us collectively build a better world for ourselves this needs to be done asap.
I don't doubt they sincerely regret what has happened - perhaps it will cause some much-needed introspection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want them shut down or something? They can't legally do that. They've taken measures to try and get more articles out there in recent years for free: - Alumni are soon going to be able to freely access all articles. - Registered researches can access all articles for free. - Anyone can now read three articles every two weeks for free. Doing what you say would immediately shut down JSTOR and they couldn't conti…
>Do you want them shut down or something? They can't legally do that Why not? And more importantly, why couldn't "putting themselves out of business" be their goal? Most of us have no problem if on-line solutions disrupt private sector business. But we get all gooey and stupid when it's a not-for-profit, like they get a pass because they're supposedly doing good. Frankly, if you can't service the needs of society, th…
Almost all of whom got a sizable chuck of their money for doing research from the taxpayer.
You can't "return" copied data. How do I return that recent Hollywood blockbuster I torrented via PirateBay? Should I courier the bits back to them? I'm sure the MPAA would be just fine and dandy with that. If JSTOR mean that they were assured that Aaron deleted what he copied, why not say that? I recognise that it may seem that I'm being overly pedantic but to me it seems that they are treating information like stuf…
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20compute.html?_r=0
You're right in that return is probably the wrong word though, because it implies that they were "gone" in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are nearly 7 billion people in the world. I think between us we can manage to read more than 1.5 papers a week.
Perhaps I was unclear: they're not giving away three articles to the entire world every two weeks, it's three per-person.
A researcher doing a literature review can easily get through fifty papers in a week. Most of them we scan to get the gist and follow up on the references looking for the few things we really need to read properly. This is a key research skill acquired by reading hundreds, eventually thousands, of papers. You get really good at it.
And that's just the papers you want to read. For each one of those I might download three based on a promising abstract to find the thing is irrelevant after all.
Thus an independent researcher with only public JSTOR access is seriously disadvantaged compared to a subscriber.
> "We will continue to work to distribute the content under our care as widely as possible" Hint: put the content on static HTTP server without an authentication system.
Seriously. Ping archive.org if that is too challenging, I'm sure they would gleefully do it all for free.
Seriously, make a competing site if you think you can do it for free.
In the Swartz case, I have to say that JSTOR acted professionally and did the right thing. They saw someone stealing their data. They reached out to the authorities to help stop the theft. Swartz returned the data, and JSTOR agreed not to pursue (civil) legal action against him. It's unfortunate that the US government couldn't match JSTOR's level of reasonableness. Yes, Swartz did something illegal, but the time (~35…
They really aren't.
I'm no fan of the copyright cabals and the continued locking away of academic publications from public view. JSTOR is a non-profit that charges relatively low fees to academic reusers for work that is not financially particularly valuable (it's mostly humanities stuff; pharmaceutical companies and technology researchers aren't desperate to read back issues of the British Journal of Philosophy of Science), and they are digitising old, obscure and non-English papers.
They are providing a very valuable service at a reasonable price for academic libraries. The restrictions being placed on the content is just part of the way that academic publishing works. JSTOR have done a bargain with the publishers and scholarly societies because they believe that getting the content scanned and online is more important than making sure there is complete public access to that content.
They are working as best as they can within the constraints of the academic system. If you want to hate on the academic system, the commercial publishers are far more deserving of your ire. The commercial publishers are charging extortionate amounts to academic libraries to sell papers back to the people who wrote them.
Eliminate the bigger for-profit journal publishers and you'll force an economic change on all of academic publishers. The whole system is at fault: don't hate the player, hate the game.